IBM Lotus Sametime Named Product of the Year by Unified Communications Magazine

Today at VoiceCon, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that Lotus Sametime software has been named the 2007 Product of the Year by Unified Communications magazine. The award honors companies that brought ground-breaking advancement to UC technologies within 2007.

IBM’s strategy combines unified communications -- the convergence of information technology and telecommunications -- with collaboration to enable a wide range of innovations that can change the way people work together. IBM combines software, services, hardware and a host of third party solutions to offer businesses of all sizes advanced unified communication and collaboration (UC2) solutions.

“With IBM’s approach to unified communications, based on who you are and what tools you use -- your communication and collaboration experience is unified, intuitive, relevant and consistent,” said Michael Rhodin general manager of IBM Lotus Software and keynote speaker at VoiceCon. “By allowing businesses to easily mashup communication and collaboration services with everyday business applications, Lotus Sametime software has transformed into the gold standard for business unified communications.”

The latest piece of IBM’s unified communications and collaboration portfolio is the Lotus Sametime Advanced offering. Currently scheduled for availability later this month, Lotus Sametime Advanced software will feature the industry’s first suite of real-time community tools that make it easier to find information and share expertise in real time with groups of people. Now, instead of spending time trying to figure out who can help solve a problem, users can reach out to a community of people instantly. By unlocking the constraints of a user’s contact list, Lotus Sametime Advanced software will help people create new communities and contacts.

The Lotus Sametime Advanced offering also features sophisticated collaboration features such as persistent chat, enabling users to keep a continuous chat discussion running on a specific topic with a related community of people. The instant sharing capabilities of Lotus Sametime Advanced software let users start a screen or application sharing session and allow other participants to “drive” on-screen and make changes to documents. Further, individuals will save time and effort by having the location of colleagues pre-populated to highlight where their location is and the last known location of off-line contacts.

Planned for availability later this year, the Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony offering will help users manage telephone calls from within the Lotus Sametime client. With Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony software users can route calls to various devices and set rules on how to handle calls based on their status. For example, a user could select to have all calls routed to a mobile device when their calendar shows they are in a meeting.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the industry leading Lotus Sametime family of products delivers unified communications and collaboration capabilities to businesses of all sizes. For more information on Lotus Sametime: www.ibm.com/lotus/sametime